A Reasonable Man

“Along the tracks green switch-lights were steady in the dusk.” – W. Faulkner.

Tobias was a man of simple tastes. He always took his coffee black, no sugar or cream, and he ate his bread with the merest pat of butter, carefully portioning the stick so it might last him a month or more. When it came to matters of dress, he chose a basic garb, unremarkable for either its color or cut. You might mistake him for any other middle-aged man on the streets of Cambridge with a head more for weather patterns or stock markets than for sartorial trends. As for his ventures into the world of courtship: well, he always took the most straightforward approach. It was his wont to ask a lady for dinner by calling her on the phone, then paying her way at at a respectable place: nothing too trendy, nor too decadent, nor too adventurous in cuisine. With love, as with life generally, Tobias preferred to keep his heart suitably engaged, which is to say, affectionate enough to show the stirrings of warmth, but always sufficiently detached so as to keep his head on straight. It was, he thought, a reasonable way of going through life, and it served him (alas) reasonably well.

One day, as he was walking the ten blocks to his office desk, he began to ruminate on a topic at once familiar and strange to him. He didn’t know why, but all of a sudden he was consumed by thoughts of loneliness. Not that he felt lonely, exactly—only that the idea of loneliness began to fascinate him. What was it to be lonely? Was it a state common to all men, to be felt at one time or another in the course of one’s life?